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  10 flourishing a condition as he left them to me.
'Well! - an honest and industrious farmer is one of the most useful
members of society; and if I devote my talents to the cultivation
of my farm, and the improvement of agriculture in general, I shall
thereby benefit, not only my own immediate connections and
dependants, but, in some degree, mankind at large:- hence I shall
not have lived in vain.' With such reflections as these I was
endeavouring to console myself, as I plodded home from the fields,
one cold, damp, cloudy evening towards the close of October. But
the gleam of a bright red fire through the parlour window had more
effect in cheering my spirits, and rebuking my thankless repinings,
than all the sage reflections and good resolutions I had forced my
mind to frame; - for I was young then, remember - only four-and-
twenty - and had not acquired half the rule over my own spirit that
I now possess - trifling as that may be.
However, that haven of bliss must not be entered till I had
exchanged my miry boots for a clean pair of shoes, and my rough
surtout for a respectable coat, and made myself generally
presentable before decent society; for my mother, with all her
kindness, was vastly particular on certain points.
In ascending to my room I was met upon the stairs by a smart,
pretty girl of nineteen, with a tidy, dumpy figure, a round face,
bright, blooming cheeks, glossy, clustering curls, and little merry
brown eyes. I need not tell you this was my sister Rose. She is,
I know, a comely matron still, and, doubtless, no less lovely - in
your eyes - than on the happy day you first beheld her. Nothing
told me then that she, a few years hence, would be the wife of one
entirely unknown to me as yet, but destined hereafter to become a
closer friend than even herself, more intimate than that unmannerly
lad of seventeen, by whom I was collared in the passage, on coming
down, and well-nigh jerked off my equilibrium, and who, in
correction for his impudence, received a resounding whack over the
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